Bringing the crack since December 2003

Nemo: Heart of Ice solicit, and the Best Character in LoEG

Turns out that there's going to be a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen spin-off graphic novel, starring none other than Captain Nemo the Second, aka Janni, as she travels to the South Pole to revisit some mountains there that once drove her dad crazy.

"It’s 1925, fifteen long years since Janni Dakkar first tried to escape the legacy of her science-pirate father, only to eventually take on his mantle and accept her destiny as the new Nemo; the next captain of the legendary Nautilus. A thirty year-old Pirate Jenny, tired of punishing the world with an unending spree of plunder and destruction, is resolved to finally step from her forebear’s lengthy shadow by attempting something at which he’d conspicuously failed, namely the exploration of Antarctica. In 1895 her father had returned from that ice-crusted continent without his reason or his crewmen, all of whom appeared to have mysteriously perished or to otherwise have disappeared. Now Captain Nemo’s daughter and successor plans to take her feared and celebrated black submersible back to the world’s South Pole in an attempt to lay her sire’s intimidating ghost forever.

There are others, though, who have become as tired of Janni’s freebooting as she herself. An influential publishing tycoon, embarrassed by the theft of valuables belonging to a visiting Ugandan monarch, sets a trio of America’s most lauded technological adventurers on the pirate queen’s trail, commencing a nightmarish chase across the frozen landscape with the pinnacles of the forbidding mountains where Prince Dakkar’s sanity had foundered growing ever nearer…

Despite myself I am actually looking forward to this somewhat. I find Janni to be more interesting than Mina became in later storylines, even if what happened in her in 1910 due to Alan Moore apparently not knowing how to create drama for female characters outside of sexual assault made me lose patience with Moore's writing for a good while.

Wondering whether a reference to the Thing might occur, though I think it's probably unlikely. And I'm also interested as to who the American adventurers might be, though the publishing tycoon will probably be Charles Foster Kane. If not him then maybe Britt Reid?

Anyways, in addition to this, I'm also going to post what I thought was the best surprise cameo of last year, in which a certain magical lady appears to save the world from the Antichrist, aka Harry Potter (hohoho, it's a reference to stupid people's fears the books promoted Satanism, hohoho).

Amusingly, Robot Chicken also used "scary powerful" Mary Poppins for a sketch recently.

For the problems that can arise in some of Moore's writing, there's few writers, I feel, that can mount a fairly epic situation and actually follow through on what it promises as well as he can. Moore's own Armageddon storyline in Promethea was wonderfully unexpected, and despite the fact that it's a complete and utter bit of Deus Ex Machina, I never felt the way he resolves the situation here - literally dropping God from the sky - was a cop out, because he'd put that much effort along with O'Neill into building this universe up.

I'm also very much looking forward to this spin-off, although I feel awful for scoffing at the notion that this will actually come out in February, given how long we had to wait between Century chapters. Janni was definitely one of the better things about 1910, unsavoury origin aside. It also makes me look forward to some more spin-offs, given Moore's talked about wanting to do a special for Orlando, and then the universe of LOEG is basically that rich, thanks to the way it's constructed, they could basically do anything.

An idea I had, which probably won't come to pass, is if all the various young detective groups, from the Famous Five, Hardy Boys etc. onwards were affiliated in some way.

Doesn't technically work with the FF, considering in the League-verse they ended up affiliated with MI5 as a reference to the Cambridge spies, but an international pooling of resources for various teen detectives (rather than them being burnouts like in the Venture Brothers) would have been interesting to see.

Mystery Inc. being one of the prominent affiliates in the 1970s, Shirley Holmes in the 1990s, Kim Possible in the early 2000s etc.

The thing that I think is hilarious about the US version (beyond it being a hastily retooled version of the Moffat version he tried to sell to a US station before they took it off his hands and claimed it was an original project) is that the guy playing Holmes in that recently starred in a version of Frankenstein with Benedict Cumberbatch in which they would switch back and forth between who was playing the Monster and who was playing the Doctor.

So they've already played the same iconic characters in the same production already, only Cumberbatch is taking time off to appear in movies, while the other guy is in a version of his show that had to mostly rebuilt due to someone twigging that it was Moffat's show with the numbers filed off.

Elementary is so much more than Sherlock with the numbers filed off. In addition to being a much different take on the character (this Sherlock has sexual needs, isn't an asshole to the people who have to work with him, feels actual emotions tht are as prominent as anyone else's, has a prominent father who looms large in the plot) the stories are new rather than being expanded adaptations of the short stories, and the bits from the original canon are dealt out much more thoughtfully (instead of dropping Moriarty's name in the pilot, they only just mentioned him, and it looks like they've got a very interesting take on Sebastian Moran that I look forward to seeing where they're going to take him) and just in general they're taking a much better approach to the story and the characters than Sherlock's, in my opinion. I can go read Scandal in Bohemia or the Hound of the Baskervilles if I really needed to see those stories.

This. One of the reasons I find Sherlock as a show so boring is because Moffat seems to have given the lead the same treatment as Doctor Who, in that the character increasingly seems like a complete arse.

I also love how Joan challenges Sherlock, and while I love Martin Freeman's twitchy surprise-driven responsive acting, I also am routinely impressed by Lucy Liu's more subtle acting. (The talk about the thumbtack, the very precise narrowing of her gaze when she realized what Sherlock had set up with her mom and brother, etc.)

Miller did actively apologise to Cumberbatch for starring in the show, from what I've heard, but given the massive differences between the shows that are evident already, I'm not entirely certain why. I'm also not entirely fond of the current need to bow down to Moffat for everything, like the guy is the first one to come up with the notion of a 'modern' Sherlock Holmes.

If I remember right Cumberbatch actually came back and said that interview was taking what he'd said about a conversation with Miller out of context. It was one of those - he said all these words, but there were more words originally and in a slightly different order - situations.

I like Lucy Liu personally, and it was retooled due to a threat of legal action, legal action as it wasn't intially a modern adaption of Sherlock Holmes as much as an American adaption of Sherlock,www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/legal-thriller-looms-as-sherlock-takes-his-caseload-to-new-york-6292682.html

WARNING: SPOILERS TO FOLLOW FOR BOTH THE ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE STORIES AND THE BBC PROGRAM.

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to- Sherlock took title names and some framing details from the Sherlock stories, but apart from that, they've failry little to do with each other.

A Study in Pink is about a serial killer who disguises his murders as suicides using an undisclosed version of the Iocaine Gambit. It is not about a roaring rampage of revenge against Mormons.

The Blind Banker uses elements from several Doyle stories, but certianly can't said to be merely an update of any of them, likewise the Great Game.

A Scandal in Belgravia starts with the same premise as a Scandal in Bohemia, but goes quite a bit further.

Need I really say that the Hound of the Baskervilles was not about a clandestine chemical warfare program?

The Reichenbach Fall is perhaps the closest in concept to its originator, both dealing with the final confrontation between Holmes and Moriarty, culminating in the apparent deaths of both. But where The Final Problem is concerned with Holmes's destruction of Moriarty's criminal empire, and Moriarty's attempt to first prevent that and then revenge himself upon Holmes, The Reichenbach Fall inverts that, with Moriarty setting out to destroy Holme's life and reputation from the beginning, and of course the method, the *plot* as it were, being completely different.

I haven't watched Elementary so I won't comment on the two shows' relative merits, and there are certainly valid critiques to be leveled against Sherlock, but to claim that the stories presented in Sherlock are simply setting-changed versions of Doyle's original stories is absurd.

I watched the pilot, and it was indeed pretty different from Sherlock however I didn't find it to really be different in a positive way. It felt to me like a fairly standard modern detective show with the names Sherlock and Watson pasted on. Admittedly modern detective stories are all heavily influenced by Sherlock Holmes and the idea of one ultra-competent crimefighter, but it just felt very paint by numbers. The uptight female lead, the wild male lead, the sexual tension, all staples of the format. I like Lucy Liu as much as the next person, but the fact that Watson is a woman, seemingly to provide the requisite sexual tension and to avoid gay jokes, confirmed to me from the start that this show was probably not going to be to my taste.Perhaps it's gotten better since then, and I'll admit that I was fairly prejudiced going in, but I think that just by virtue of being constantly compared to Sherlock, Elementary is always going to look like the ugly step-sister.

Yes, as much as I like Luck Liu as an actress, it kind of did seem like they cast a female Watson to avoid the "implied" relationship between the male characters (a thing the creators of Sherlock knew about and referenced in ways that could be interpreted as being just very good friends or more).

I disagree about Liu. I understand she went really minimal in her acting, and some people seem to think she is phoning it in, but I think she chose to go minimal because of how guarded Joan is around Sherlock, when she meets a friend and especially when she meets her family, the icyness begins to melt away. I'm not saying it's her best work, but I definitely think she's taking it very seriously.

As for sexual tension, I actually found it really refreshing how, to me, there really isn't any. The series has gone on to make it pretty explicit that Joan and Sherlock don't have that kind of relationship, and if you watch interviews Liu and Miller both say that is not how they are playing their relationship. That's part of the reason I like it so much, it's so refreshing to see a platonic male-female relationship without sexual tension.

I think its strongest elements are the relationship between Sherlock and Joan and the really solid direction. I love grimy they make everything seem. Too many crime shows make New York seem sterile like a crime scene, Elementary gives plenty of dirty shots.

The weakest elements are the crimes themselves, which is pretty bad in a crime procedural (they are pretty paint by numbers, but have gotten better), but to me it's forgivable because I enjoy watching Liu and Miller so much.

The other problem is central in many crime procedurals: part of the fun is figuring out the crime at home, but if you make it too easy you invalidate the skills of the detectives. If Sherlock is supposed to be this amazing detective, how come I can figure it out before he can? But then you risk alienating the audience if they don't show any clues. This is a problem that any Sherlock adaptation has (Doyle suffered from it sometimes, and it's one of the reasons why I don't enjoy Sherlock as much)

This is why I enjoyed Columbo, of all things, above many, many other crime/detective shows. It was great fun seeing how the crime came together in the first ten minutes and then watching Peter Falk brilliantly 'fumble' his way through things to solving the case, and it removed the problem of us figuring things out before the show allowed the lead to.

CBS asked Moffat's production company to make a pilot for an American remake of Sherlock, only to cancel the order once the paperwork got through. The show they pitched to get Elementary made involved them having a similar relationship between Sherlock and Mycroft, and several other simularities such as the way that show used mobile phones.

More changes were added later, this was before they even cast Miller or Lucy Liu, but yeah, it at least started with Sherlock with the numbers filed off.www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/legal-thriller-looms-as-sherlock-takes-his-caseload-to-new-york-6292682.html

Regarding these pages;The first time I saw this on here I saw the red and green glasses and immediately assumed that Spider Jerusalem had shown up to hit the Anti-Christ with the ol' bowel disruptor. I was pretty disappointed to see that it was "just" Mary Poppins.I'm still not too happy about the way that story wrapped up. One of the most beloved children's characters from Moore's childhood showing up to beat up one of the most beloved characters of today just reeks of "Things were better back in my day!" I think there are valid complaints one could make about the Harry Potter series, but a lot of what I've seen here and in other places really makes it seem like Moore didn't criticize the series so much as just say that it sucked and was terrible, without much actual backup.

On a lighter note, I wonder who the adventurers are going to be, I'm not familiar enough with literature from that time to even make a guess. Whoever Moore winds up using I hope he doesn't just write them as a bunch of unpleasant bastards, which seems like it's kind of his MO with this series.

To be fair, at this point in Century's narrative, everything was being informed by Moore's 'Moonchild Antichrist' storyline and funnelling rapidly into that. It isn't really a valid representation of Harry Potter for Moore to even make a proper jab at, just like his version of Lord Voldemort wasn't the same Lord Voldemort as the one that appeared in Rowling's actual stories - presumably because Rowling's take had never been born during or in the midst of an actual Orwellian state. As such, everything is informed by the narrative Moore was making, and as such, it isn't just a potshot at Harry Potter, and Moore did enough with the older characters, to me, that he isn't even trying to make a case for 'Character X of my Childhood is better'. I mean, shit, look at his take on James Bond.

I also think it's distinctly unfair to suggest Moore's MO is just 'making characters unpleasant bastards', which to me, suggests that you've not read all of the series, frankly. Apologies if you have, but that's just the feeling I get.

You're right of course, I was unfairly generalizing. I only ever read the first series and skimmed some of the rest, including the Black Dossier, since the artwork wasn't to my taste and the story was a lot less swashbuckling than I like my stories to be. Hyde, Doctor Griffin, and James Bond are really the only characters who spring to mind as characters with which Moore really dialed up the unpleasantness.I just hope that whichever characters Moore uses here actually feel true to the original stories, instead of being kind of made to fit a role like Harry Potter was, if I understand you correctly.

I understand. It is one of those things that it can be something of an unpleasant slog - the first chapter of Century, for instance, the 1910 episode, has an extremely unpleasant scene that did make me question Moore as a writer, although he made up for it later. I obviously can't speak for him, but I think even he has tropes and things that he considers it easy to go back to, at times.

So.. Yeah. I definitely understand, but I think that in some instances, these characters would be considered unpleasant. Griffin, for instance, declared "This is day one of year one of the new epoch—the Epoch of the Invisible Man. I am Invisible Man the First," in the original novel, showing that he was a distinctly unpleasant sort with delusions of ruling the world and abusing his newfound power even then. Hyde is, of course, Hyde, a monster born of the notion of siphoning off one's sins anyway, and Bond himself is someone who once declared 'the bitch is dead' of the woman he loved and proceeded to basically treat women the way he does because of that, including apparently feeling the urge to 'cure' a woman of being a lesbian. Of those, Hyde does actually have a heart, in a classic monster manner, which is revealed predominantly during the series take on War of the Worlds.

But in many ways, Moore is actually being honest about who these characters are. The literary Bond is not a pleasant person, nor is he meant to be likeable, after all - I think part of the reason we do see him as something of a 'hero' is more down to the films, especially Moore's tenure, who was slightly more noble than other iterations, in some ways.

I got the impression that the Harry Potter stand-in was meant to represent the wave of books where teenagers are not only the main characters, but have huge powers and end up saving the world, and that the real end result of giving a teen that much power without the accompanying discipline (and he makes it clear that he doesn't consider the faux-Latin and wand-waving of HP to be "real" magic), they're much more likely to end up destroying the world instead.

In the Black Dossier graphic novel the idea is that otherworldly place where Mary hails from (the Blazing World), this is demonstrated for the reader in it being laid out in 3D panels you have to look at through a supplied pair of red and green glasses.

I think that the idea is that in-verse the glasses are meant to filter the experience down to their perception of space instead of it mimicking our version. That is to say, to us it's 3D but to them unfiltered it'd be like trying to wrap their heads around a 4D shape.

I just saw a rerun of the Next Generation episode which featured a similar situation - Enterprise encountered a cloud of 2D beings, which they couldn't even see before they reconfigured their sensors. Just, you know, found the idea intriguing enough to mention.

I expect that we'll see Tom Swift and/or one of the Frank Reade family as part of the trio of American adventurers. Admittedly, 1925 is a little late for the usual Edisonade protagonists, but I could see Moore drawing from that sub-genre to make a point.

Hmmm, Moore finally going deeper into Lovecraft with this series should be good. At the very least he should have a field day with Lovecraft's views on race.

Still trying to figure out what Moore's take on HP was supposed to mean. If it's a critique on modern franchises or "phenomena" for being soulless and banal as some comic reviewers have suggested, I have to call bullshit, since the sole reason these have become franchises is specifically because they are accessible to kids/tweens, and once these kids/tweens finish reading them they will move on to more "serious" literature, and even think about writing their own books which make the whole "phenomena" thing a nigh unprecedented victory for pumping new life and imagination into literature. Hell on that level I will even defend the Twilight series.

I don't know if that's true, about kids moving on to more serious literature afterwards. It's not as if Harry Potter is a basic introduction to literature; it's really long and fairly complex in its own right. Someone who starts reading Harry Potter is already fairly literate, and if Harry Potter is what starts them reading, I would think it's because it's at the complexity level they're comfortable with.

I mean, heck, the next big YA fiction phenomenon following Harry Potter was Twilight, so that's what the YA readership as a whole moved on to.

I always hoped Moore would get tired of the least interesting of the books he created for the defunct ABC line, so this is sad news. Fan fiction is fun, I suppose, for those who like to write it, but why has Alan Moore been writing it for over a decade now? When is he going to do something new again?

Converting old tv scripts into comics is certainly not what I expect from Alan Moore; it's what I'd expect from mediocre writers like Steve Niles who got his rejected crappy vampire film script recycled into a crappy but successful vampire comic and adapted into a crappy vampire film. I just expect something denser, more elaborate from Moore.

But he's obviously doing the best he can to distance himself from the genius who wrote From Hell and Promethea.

I hear ya, Moore's a great writer but LoEG is just so not for me. It'd be great to see him do something like Promethea or Tom Strong again. Some reconstructive stuff would be a nice change from insulting modern comics and doing classic literature fanfic.

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